Despite the name, the street has never
been much of a business district; the story about banks
moving here from downtown to escape an 1822 smallpox epidemic
is apparently a just-so story made up to explain the
sleepy street's inappropriate name. And it was never really
named Cherry Lane; that was a story invented by
William Rainey,
co-founder of the theater, to explain its name,
which is actually a pun on
London's Drury Lane.

West/South:

50:Commerce, the restaurant in this 1912
building, has been known variously
as the Blue Mill Tavern and The Grange Hall.
It appears in The Brothers McMullen,
Woody Allen's Anything Else and the final
episode of Sex in the City. Supposedly Eugene O'Neill
and the Rosenbergs used to hang out here.

46-48: Commerce Street takes a right-angle turn here--becoming
an east/west street. The houses that face
each other in the corner--one of which was owned by
department store tycoon
A.T. Stewart--
have been dubbed the Pie Houses, from the fancy that
they are one house with a slice taken out
of it. They housed a Thieves' Court in
Arthur Train's novel The Man Hunt.

38-42: Founded by Edna St. Vincent Millay
and others in 1924 as a more surreal
alternative to the Provincetown Playhouse,
in a
former silo built in 1817. Has
premiered plays by
F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Dos Passos,
Gertrude Stein, Samuel Beckett,
Edward Albee, etc. James Dean appeared onstage
in 1954. The theater appears in such films as
Reds (standing in for the Provincetown Playhouse),
Godspell, Woody Allen's Another
Woman and Spike Lee's Mo' Better Blues
(as the Beneath the Underdog club)--not to mention
Tina Turner's "What's Love Got to Do With It?" video.

Isaacs-Hendricks House

Corner (77 Bedford): The oldest in the
Village, dating to 1799--though the Greek Revival
brick facade is newer, dating to 1836. Owner
Harmon Hendricks teamed up with Paul Revere to
corner the copper market.

COMMERCE

STREET

East/North:

39-41 (corner): Legend has it that they
were built by a sea captain for his
feuding daughters, with a garden between them
in hopes they would reconcile. Sadly, they
were actually built in 1831 by milkman
Peter Huyler; history does not record how his children got
along. The mansard roofs date to 1873.

Corner (81 Bedford): An apartment in 81 Bedford was
used by the CIA as a safe house for
LSD experiments from 1952-54--
sometimes administered by prostitutes on unwitting non-volunteers.

South:

Corner (72 Bed- ford):Casa, Brazilian

24-28: Federal-style houses built 1821.

COMMERCE

North:

19: Note attorney/antiquary sign.

17: Built 1830--on a site where Aaron Burr lived in 1800.

11: Built 1826. Said to be the home of Washington
Irving's sister,
where he allegedly wrote Sleepy Hollow.
(
Other sources say he is thought to have written
it at his sister's place in Birmingham,
England.)